Fools in Mötley

The life and times of the Crüe -- so far

by Carly Carioli

Two new books examine the legacy of Mötley Crüe. The most recent is a glossy tell-all entitled The Dirt: The Autobiography of Mötley Crüe (HarperCollins), by the band as told to Neil Strauss. Strauss is a pop-music critic for the New York Times and the co-author of bestselling autobiographies by both Marilyn Manson and wrestling superstar Mick "Mankind" Foley as well as the forthcoming drug-binge memoir by Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. But a problem with writing a book about Mötley Crüe became evident almost before the ink was dry on the first pressing: they aren't done screwing up yet.

Last week, the Los Angeles County Fire Department released yet another soon-to-be-classic recording by ex-Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, whose solo output includes a bestselling home video and a less-successful rap-metal album. Add to his discography the tape of his 911 call as a four-year-old guest at his son's fifth-birthday party lay dying in his backyard, having drowned in the shallow end of Tommy's pool. The tape doesn't have a title yet, but that's only because "He's puking, but I don't think he's breathing" has been copyrighted by the estates of Jeff Buckley and Keith Moon. And if making jokes about dead children seems in very bad taste, wait'll you get a load of The Dirt, a book that might have saved a life had it been released just a few weeks earlier, since after reading it no parent in his or her right mind would leave a child at Tommy Lee's house.

The other new book about Mötley Crüe is 28-year-old Midwestern rock critic Chuck Klosterman's memoir of heavy-metal fandom, Fargo Rock City (Scribner). In stark contrast to The Dirt, Fargo is about not getting laid, not being cool, not killing anyone, not doing drugs, and being about as far as is humanly possible from touring the world in a rock-and-roll band. For that, it is an invaluable companion volume. "In the attempt to paint the 1980s as some glossy, capitalistic wasteland, contemporary writers tend to ignore how unremarkable things actually were," writes Klosterman of his youth, meaning, of course, how unremarkable things were to him. "The single biggest influence on our lives was the inescapable sameness of everything. . . . To be honest, I don't know if I've ever been legitimately shocked by anything, even as a third-grader in 1981. That was the year John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, and I wasn't surprised at all (in fact, it seemed to me that presidential assassinations didn't happen nearly as often as one would expect). From what I could tell, the world had always been a deeply underwhelming place . . . and it was perfectly fine with me."

"Mötley Crüe," he continues, "was made to live in this kind of world." Not because they were different but for the exact opposite reason -- because they were profoundly in tune with the sameness of the '80s. "The problem with the current generation of rock academics is that they remember when rock music seemed new," Klosterman writes. "It's impossible for them to relate to those of us who have never known a world where rock'n'roll wasn't everywhere, all the time. . . . As long as I can remember, all good rock bands told lies about themselves and dressed like freaks; that was part of what defined being a `rock star.' Mötley Crüe was a little more overt about following this criteria, but that only made me like them immediately."

He's hit it dead-on: Mötley Crüe were never revolutionary and never meant to be. What they did -- and what bands from White Zombie and Marilyn Manson to Nashville Pussy and the Donnas have done more recently -- was to confirm and then elaborate on the rock-and-roll cliché. The Crüe's charm was precisely that they never pretended that rock and roll was anything more than a cliché (a notion that is seconded in The Dirt) -- in fact, the cliché was what they were playing. As it turned out, they were virtuosos. The band appealed to a vast audience that understood rock and roll exactly the same way. Which is why the Crüe, and heavy metal in general, tended to offend "serious" rock fans and critics -- not for the content or the form but for the assumption that underlaid the content and form. It is also why, when rock and roll briefly turned out to have a little surprise left, Mötley Crüe suddenly felt so ancient.

The Dirt is, as you'd expect, a sprightly and enjoyable read: breezy, bitchy, back-biting, ingenious, disingenuous, salacious, saccharine, and ultimately disposable -- in other words, the utter equal of the band's music. It reads like the hastily edited transcripts from a very long and uncensored version of Behind the Music, right down to its cloying closing chapters, which are entitled "Hollywood Ending." Although it often commits the pop-confessional sin of confusing candor with sincerity, it is at times both candid and sincere; yet the band members often reveal the most about themselves when they're lying through their teeth, or else ripping holes in each other's stories.

The notorious events of Mötley Crüe's career are familiar from the tabloids. There's singer Vince Neil's slap-on-the-wrist prison sentence for a drunken-driving accident that killed his passenger, Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley, and severely injured the occupants of an oncoming car. There's also the hideous death of Neil's four-year-old daughter, Skylar, from cancer, which is one of the book's few genuinely moving passages. (So moving, in fact, that it feels out of place.) There's Nikki Sixx's multiple heroin overdoses, which ought to have been written off as business expenses (he notes wryly after penning the hit "Kickstart My Heart" that "I always managed to get a song out of each overdose"). Drummer Tommy Lee's celebrity marriages to Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson, and the abuse that followed. The departure and return of Neil; the departure of Lee; the band's war with, and defection from, Elektra Records in the wake of grunge.

The book has a hard-boiled tone that softens into pathos, nostalgia, new-agey inner-child coddling, name calling, and petty inter-squad rivalry -- those, of course, are the juicy bits. But Neil's evocations of the band's salad days on the Sunset Strip at the height of the glam explosion are electrifying and unsentimental, with an even hand for the squalor and the daftness of its fog of Aquanet, cockroaches, needles, and groupies. Sixx declares the "innocence and naïveté" of himself at that time, "some cocky little kid in a club who, like so many others before and after him, thought that a sore prick and burning nostrils meant he was king of the world." Neil never confuses their lack of sophistication with innocence.

The Dirt's cartoonish depictions of gratuitous sex, drugs, violence, and prison ring, at this late date, a little rote. It probably doesn't help that their fornicatory escapades are written in the style of the Penthouse letters section, complete with punning double-entendre punch lines. Lee is evasive on the subject of Pamela Anderson but horrifyingly detailed with respect to an incident involving a former fiancée named Honey who made the mistake of calling his mother a cunt. "I fucking smashed her right in the grille, dude," he writes. "Her hands flew to her mouth, and she dropped to the ground. . . . As we drove away, I looked back and saw her kneeling on the pavement and spitting her teeth into her hand, which was dripping with mucousy strands of blood."

These are not, with the possible exception of Mick Mars (who suffers from degenerative calcification of the skeleton called ankylosing spondylitis, which is slowly freezing his joints into a painful, statue-like stasis), sympathetic characters. Neither should they be, though that doesn't stop them from trying. The latter two-thirds of the book is filled as much with therapy and counseling and lawyers and dream interpreters as with sex and drugs. As for rock and roll, well, the Crüe have precious little to say for their music. "I was shocked the record went double platinum," says Vince Neil of Theatre of Pain, "and maybe it just reinforced the idea that we were so great we could even get away with putting out a terrible album." "As for the music," writes Sixx after the release of Girls, Girls, Girls, "I could hardly even stand the last two albums I had written. And the acclaim? There was none. Critics despised us. I felt like the McDonald's of rock and roll. My life was disposable: consume me and throw me out."

In Fargo Rock City, Klosterman remembers that the mere sight of the cover of Shout at the Devil prompted him to tell all his friends about this cool new band he'd discovered, even before he'd listened to the album. Which is not to suggest that the Crüe's music was beside the point but simply that they saw music as the means to a larger performance on a larger stage. If you're looking for a moral to their story, you won't find one. "Mötley Crüe did stupid things because they were Mötley Crüe," writes their former manager, Doc McGhee, in The Dirt. "There was no reason for anything . . . they didn't even have to try: their life was the rock-and-roll life." On second thought, maybe there is a moral after all: what you see is what you get.